Friday Feature

Famed
civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael was born on June 29, 1941, in Port of
Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Carmichael's parents immigrated to New York when he
was a toddler, leaving him in the care of his grandmother until the age of 11,
when he followed his parents to the United States. His mother, Mabel, was a
stewardess for a steamship line, and his father, Adolphus, worked as a
carpenter by day and a taxi driver by night. An industrious and optimistic immigrant,
Adolphus Carmichael chased a version of the American Dream that his son would
later criticize as an instrument of racist economic oppression. As Stokely
Carmichael later said, "My old man believed in this work-and-overcome
stuff. He was religious, never lied, never cheated or stole. He did carpentry
all day and drove taxis all night and the next thing that came to that poor
black man was death—from working too hard. And he was only in his 40s."

In
1954, at the age of 13, Stokely Carmichael became a naturalized American
citizen and his family moved to a predominantly Italian and Jewish neighborhood
in the Bronx called Morris Park. Soon Carmichael became the only black member
of a street gang called the Morris Park Dukes. In 1956, he passed the admissions
test to get into the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, where he was
introduced to an entirely different social set—the children of New York City's
rich white liberal elite. Carmichael was popular among his new classmates; he
attended parties frequently and dated white girls. However, even at that age,
he was highly conscious of the racial differences that divided him from his
classmates. Carmichael later recalled his high school friendships in harsh
terms: "Now that I realize how phony they all were, how I hate myself for
it. Being liberal was an intellectual game with these cats. They were still
white, and I was black.''

Though
he had been aware of the American Civil Rights Movement for years, it was not
until one night toward the end of high school, when he saw footage of a sit-in
on television, that Carmichael felt compelled to join the struggle. "When
I first heard about the Negroes sitting in at lunch counters down South,"
he later recalled, "I thought they were just a bunch of publicity hounds.
But one night when I saw those young kids on TV, getting back up on the lunch
counter stools after being knocked off them, sugar in their eyes, ketchup in
their hair—well, something happened to me. Suddenly I was burning.'' He joined
the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), picketed a Woolworth's store in New
York and traveled to sit-ins in Virginia and South Carolina.

A
stellar student, Carmichael received scholarship offers to a variety of
prestigious predominantly white universities after graduating high school in
1960. He chose instead to attend the historically black Howard University in
Washington, D.C. There he majored in philosophy, studying the works of Camus,
Sartre and Santayana and considering ways to apply their theoretical frameworks
to the issues facing the civil rights movement. At the same time, Carmichael
continued to increase his participation in the movement itself. While still a
freshman in 1961, he went on his first Freedom Ride—an integrated bus tour
through the South to challenge the segregation of interstate travel. During
that trip, he was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi for entering the
"whites only" bus stop waiting room and jailed for 49 days.
Undeterred, Carmichael remained actively involved in the civil rights movement
throughout his college years, participating in another Freedom Ride in
Maryland, a demonstration in Georgia and a hospital workers' strike in New
York. He graduated from Howard University with honors in 1964.

Carmichael left school at a critical
moment in the history of the Civil Rights Movement. The Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee dubbed the summer of 1964 "Freedom Summer,"
rolling out an aggressive campaign to register black voters in the Deep South.
Carmichael joined the SNCC as a newly minted college graduate, using his
eloquence and natural leadership skills to quickly be appointed field organizer
for Lowndes County, Alabama. When Carmichael arrived in Lowndes County in 1965,
African Americans made up the majority of the population but remained entirely
unrepresented in government. In one year, Carmichael managed to raise the
number of registered black voters from 70 to 2,600—300 more than the number of
registered white voters in the county.

Unsatisfied
with the response of either of the major political parties to his registration
efforts, Carmichael founded his own party, the Lowndes County Freedom
Organization. To satisfy a requirement that all political parties have an
official logo, he chose a black panther, which later provided the inspiration for
the Black Panthers (a different black activist organization founded in Oakland,
California).At this stage in his life, Carmichael adhered to the philosophy of
nonviolent resistance espoused by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In addition to
moral opposition to violence, proponents of nonviolent resistance believed that
the strategy would win public support for civil rights by drawing a sharp
contrast—captured on nightly television—between the peacefulness of the
protestors and the brutality of the police and hecklers opposing them. However,
as time went on, Carmichael—like many young activists—became frustrated with
the slow pace of progress and with having to endure repeated acts of violence
and humiliation at the hands of white police officers without recourse.

By
the time he was elected national chairman of SNCC in May 1966, Carmichael had
largely lost faith in the theory of nonviolent resistance that he—and SNCC—had
once held dear. As chairman, he turned SNCC in a sharply radical direction,
making it clear that white members, once actively recruited, were no longer
welcome. The defining moment of Carmichael's tenure as chairman—and perhaps of
his life—came only weeks after he took over leadership of the organization. In
June 1966, James Meredith, a civil rights activist who had been the first black
student to attend the University of Mississippi, embarked on a solitary
"Walk Against Fear" from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi.
About 20 miles into Mississippi, Meredith was shot and wounded too severely to
continue. Carmichael decided that SNCC volunteers should carry on the march in
his place, and upon reaching Greenwood, Mississippi, on June 16; an enraged
Carmichael gave the address for which he would forever be best remembered.
"We been saying 'freedom' for six years," he said. "What we are
going to start saying now is 'Black Power.'"

The
phrase "Black Power" quickly caught on as the rallying cry of a
younger, more radical generation of civil rights activists. The term also
resonated internationally, becoming a slogan of resistance to European
imperialism in Africa. In his 1968 book, Black Power: The Politics of
Liberation, Carmichael explained the meaning of black power: ''It is a call
for black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, to
build a sense of community. It is a call for black people to define their own
goals, to lead their own organizations. ''Black Power also represented
Carmichael's break with King's doctrine of nonviolence and its end goal of
racial integration. Instead, he associated the term with the doctrine of black
separatism, articulated most prominently by Malcolm X. "When you talk of
black power, you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western
civilization has created,'' Carmichael said in one speech. Unsurprisingly, the
turn to black power proved controversial, evoking fear in many white Americans,
even those previously sympathetic to the civil rights movement, and
exacerbating fissures within the movement itself between older proponents of
nonviolence and younger advocates of separatism. Martin Luther King called
black power "an unfortunate choice of words."

In 1967, Carmichael took a
transformative journey, traveling outside the United States to visit with
revolutionary leaders in Cuba, North Vietnam, China and Guinea. Upon his return
to the United States, he left SNCC and became prime minister of the more
radical Black Panthers. He spent the next two years speaking around the country
and writing essays on Black Nationalism, black separatism and, increasingly,
pan-Africanism, which ultimately became Carmichael's life cause. In 1969,
Carmichael quit the Black Panthers and left the United States to take up
permanent residence in Conakry, Guinea, where he dedicated his life to the
cause of pan-African unity. "America does not belong to the blacks,"
he said, explaining his departure from the country. Carmichael changed his name
to Kwame Ture to honor both the president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and the
president of Guinea, Sékou Touré. In 1968, Carmichael
married Miriam Makeba, a South African singer. After they divorced, he later
married a Guinean doctor named Marlyatou Barry. Although he made frequent trips
back to the United States to advocate pan-Africanism as the only true path to
liberation for black people worldwide, Carmichael maintained permanent
residence in Guinea for the rest of his life.

Carmichael
was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1985, and although it is unclear
precisely what he meant, he said publicly that his cancer "was given to me
by forces of American imperialism and others who conspired with them.'' He died
on November 15, 1998, at the age of 57.An inspired orator, persuasive essayist,
effective organizer and expansive thinker, Carmichael stands out as one of the
preeminent figures of the American civil rights movement. His tireless spirit
and radical outlook are perhaps best captured by the greeting with which he
answered his telephone until his dying day: "Ready for the
revolution!"